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I’m a huge South Park fan and one of my favourite episodes is Cartmanland. Cartman inherits a million dollars. Rather than do the rational, reasonable thing, he fulfills his lifelong dream and purchases a failing amusement park. So doing, he accidentally accomplishes what many set out to do: be a successful entrepreneur.

The goal at CakeMail is to provide an elegant and simple-to-use email marketing app.

Simple-to-use is an easy concept to grasp. Simple-to-use means that a six-year old could use CakeMail to create a campaign. Simple means that you skip the learning curve, and dive straight into capturing website visitors that get added to your list, create and send a campaign in just a few easy steps and easily track your results.

The best way to ensure your success is to have a can-do attitude. You need to keep a positive and realistic view on things and keep learning. More than anything, I learned how to make the best of everything life threw at me, whether it was a remote job or a bad situation.

I transformed the lemons of remote work into lemonade, and paired it with some mint flavored cupcakes.

Before we get into the new version, what it does and why we think it’s good for you, we need to tell you a bit about ourselves.

We believe that small businesses are special.

That they have something to say. A story to share. Values they uphold.

That they’re building a world according to their vision. A better world.

The CakeMail team wants to be a part of the success and growth of businesses. And we wanted to change the world by crafting a simpler product: an app so simple that it could be used by anyone, regardless of their background.

So we removed the extras. The frills. The bells. The whistles.

Because after all, the purpose of email marketing is found in the campaigns you send – the message you share and the story you tell.

Creating campaigns has never been easier. People that matter have never been more accessible.

Everything from scratch

Email marketing shouldn’t be a chore. It shouldn’t be complicated. It’s only one more way to get the word out about what you do. And it should be as simple, and satisfying, as pressing “Send” when you’re done writing.

We’re right there with you.

We’re a small business too.

CakeMail 4 had to be something that a company with a strong entrepreneurial spirit would love to show another entrepreneur.

It had to be a product we’d be proud to show other designers, product experts, marketers, software engineers… It had to be elegant; efficient.

First of all, I would like to thank all of you who didn’t opt-out (or worse, brand me as SPAM) as a result of the erroneous send. By the same token, I’d like to reassure you all: it won’t happen again.

In 2012, we had 52 release notes (In January alone, we had ten…) Yet, in 2013, not a peep, nor a sound: no new features, no bug fixes.

Why?

In 2013 we’ll be launching the fourth major version of CakeMail.

What does this mean?

Work on “CakeMail 4” started last October, with a focus on speed, responsiveness and simplicity. The user interface is getting a makeover, with a rethought structure and more straightforward flows.

But that’s another blog post altogether.

We’re also working on the back-end to improve the speed and access to CakeMail so that the app can load as quickly in Alberta as in Australia.

That means major changes to the infrastructure, from new server deployments to control of the DNS. Most of the infrastructure changes will greatly impact CakeMail in general, and CakeMail 4 in particular.

We can’t wait to show all this work to you in a near future and I hope you will be as excited as we are.

If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time, but you’ll need to act fast before the remaining spots disappear.

Members of the CakeMail dev team will be on-site to help folks get started with the CakeMail API, answer questions, and more. Oh – and we’re keeping our eyes peeled for a few new team members, so don’t be shy if you think we might have the cool new job you’re looking for (you can check out our current postings right here).

You’ve just sent your first campaign and now it’s time to review campaign reports. We’ve already looked at engagement and boosting your clicks - now we’ll take a closer look at open rates and how they work.

An open is registered in your campaign report when a recipient opens a campaign that has images enabled.

An impliedopen happens when a recipient has clicked on one or more of the links included in your campaign, without having actually viewed or displayed any of the images. Contacts who receive the plain-text version of your campaign will also register as implied opens when they click on a link.

An unopened email is a message that was never opened by the recipient, or a campaign that may have been opened but had no images enabled and the recipient didn’t click on any links or perform any other actions.

If you have included images in your campaign, it is possible that the email client has blocked images from loading. Until the recipient clicks to show content or display images (or even better, selects “Always show content from…”), the campaign won’t be recorded as opened. Be sure to let your list know to allow your images to be displayed or encourage them to add your From address (as shown in the example below) to their white list / address book to make your images display by default in the future.

You can see a detailed report of opens by accessing your delivered campaign and clicking on Detailed Statistics.

New EU cookie legislation went into effect May 25, 2012 that requires all users to give websites their consent to install cookies and track user information.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small file, typically made up of letters and numbers, that is automatically saved to a device when a user accesses a website. These cookies are then read by the originating website on each subsequent visit. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device and their preferences or settings where applicable. For more information, you can refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

What effect does this new law have on CakeMail?

To be compliant with this new law, we have introduced a new setting in the administration panel (under Your site settings -> General settings) that lets resellers activate or deactivate this setting as required. When activated, individual users will have to accept the application’s cookies policy before signing in. By default, this setting is deactivated as it only applies to a small segment of users.

When users click on “Change settings”, they are presented with a popup that provides more explanation, as well as a way for them to manage which cookies they accept. These cookies are separated into three categories: Strictly Necessary, Functionality and Targeting. If a user refuses the cookies classified under Strictly necessary, the application will simply not work.

If users change their mind about which cookies they would like to allow, we have also added easy access to cookie settings in the footer of the application, as in the example below:

But wait… there’s more!

We’ve also added the possibility for resellers to add a link pointing to their privacy policy in the footer of the application. This policy will need to be hosted on the reseller’s own website, and helps provide legal information to clients.

These features are now available in CakeMail and we hope you’ll find them useful. For detailed information, please read our Knowledge Base Article. If you have any questions, feel free to contact CakeMail Support or leave a comment below.

Starting today, in order to improve overall performance, detailed campaign reports for delivered campaigns that are more than six months old will be automatically archived. Campaign overview reports will still include high level campaign information but the following data will be removed from the user interface for archived campaigns: